Interview With Charlton Heston

MJ: Mr. Charlton Heston, thank you for joining us today.

CH: Nice to be with you. Nice to have a chance to talk to a Japanese audience. The Japanese audiences have always been very generous to me, and I'm grateful for that.

MJ: Would you give us a short synopsis of your movie career and the major roles that you've played?

CH: Oh my goodness... a short synopsis. Well, I've made, what, nearly 70 films, including an unfortunate proportion of terrible ones, and a few very good ones. And I'm still working away. And my determination is to get it absolutely right one time, which of course is unachievable. Art is not perfectible. You can't ever get it absolutely right. But it gives you a good goal to set for yourself. The title of my autobiography, In the Arena,

is from a speech by Theodore Roosevelt, in 1910, Roosevelt being a great

American, and also one very much involved in the opening of Japan to the

rest of the world as I'm sure your audience knows. And in this speech, he

said, "The credit doesn't belong to the critic, but to the man who's in the

arena. Who gets up off the sand, who wipes the blood off his face, and

goes back and tries again." And to me this is very much in the ethic of

the Bushido code, the Samurai code. And maybe that's part of what my appeal

to Japanese audiences has been over the years. Many of my films explore

these values, which are to a certain extent no longer as respected in the

United States and I think that's too bad.

MJ: Can you talk about some of the favorite characters that you've played?

CH: Well, what, Moses is certainly one of the great figures in history, not

only in terms of his impact on human history, but his significance as a

man. And it's important to remember that Moses was a man. He's revered by

three of the great religions of the world, but considered divine by none of

them. He was a man. And he did what he did as best he could. And again this

is the kind of role that resonates I think in the Japanese culture as well.

MJ: Have we lost this sense of their being human, and we again, attribute

them... attribute divine qualities to them?

CH: Not with Moses, no, no. To Muslim, Christian, and Jew, Moses was a man,

not divine. And I think this is important. Divine figures are beyond

judgment, beyond our comprehension. How could they do what they did?

Buddha, Christ, Mohammed, are beyond, in the end, human comprehension,

being divine. Moses is another situation.

MJ: As I run through the list of the people that you've played, great men,

Moses, Michelangelo, Sherlock Holmes...

CH: Well, no, Sherlock Holmes doesn't count, because he's not a real

figure.

MJ: True. Ok, you're right.

CH: But see...

MJ: Andrew Jackson....

CH: Andrew Jackson.

MJ: Thomas Jefferson, Sir Thomas Moore.

CH: Sir Thomas Moore.

MJ: What do you have to draw upon in yourself to play great men?

CH: Well, obviously you're playing someone who is beyond your own

capacities as a man. You have in my view a responsibility to the historic

reality of Andrew Jackson, Sir Thomas Moore, Michelangelo. All these

figures. And you must research what is there. There are usually, not

always, usually, personal papers. In the case of Michelangelo, some 400

letters to his family, most of them complaining, because he gave them all

his money because he didn't know what else to do with it, he was not

interested in creature comforts, and yet he felt they didn't really deserve

it, but he gave it to them anyway. And the contemporary biographies, in the

case again of Michelangelo, Visari's Lives of the Painters. Jefferson,

Jackson, Cardinal Richileu , Henry the Eighth, there are all kinds of

personal papers that you research. And your responsibility is to present

the truth of the character, not a revisionist version of what that

character might have done or should have done or didn't do, which has no...

That's not history. I long ago came to realize that history is not only the

most important subject but....

(Helicopter interrupts)

There is a group of filmmakers, Oliver Stone among them, prominent, who

feel that they have a right to revise history, to rewrite history. And I

guess Oliver Stone perhaps in the world is the significant filmmaker in

that category. He's a brilliant filmmaker, but I think he's totally wrong

in that. If you play Sir Thomas Moore, or Andrew Jackson, or Cardinal

Richilieu, or any of these guys, you have to play the reality of the man,

not what 1990's sensitivity thinks he should have been. And I've always

tried to do that. I've done maybe a dozen of these men, and I admire them

enormously. They are... I believe in the extraordinary man. We live in the

century of the common man. We live in a time when certainly all men are

created equal, that's in out constitution. And yet there are extraordinary

men, and they have changed the world. That's an uncomfortable idea for the

modern sensibility, in which any kid out of Barnard or Harvard can stand up

and do what Andrew Jackson did. Not so. Not so. I think having wrestled

with these guys, through most of career, I've played at least a dozen of

them, there are two things they have in common. Men as disparate each from

the other. Very disparate. Say Thomas Jefferson as opposed to Cardinal

Richileu, Michelangelo to Henry the Eighth, all these kinds are very

different. Brigham Young; very different kind of guy from John the Baptist,

though both were prophets of a new religion, what they both had, what they

all had, in common, was, one, an extraordinary energy. Usually including

physical energy. Not always. Cardinal Richileu suffered from insomnia all

his life, which he dealt with by keeping a nighttime secretary and

dictating when he couldn't sleep. And Andrew Jackson, who from his middle

years suffered from the kind of intestinal ill health that you suppose

today could be cured in no time, but he just gutted it out. And so those

two aside, what they had was energy. What they had in addition all of them

was a capacity to focus that energy on a given goal: leading the Jews out

of Egypt, driving the Moors out of Spain, painting the Sistine ceiling,

inventing the United States of America. All of these qualities... These

enormous tasks. Just enormous. How could any man do that? They did it.

Brigham Young, leading the Mormons to a new promised land. How could they

do that in the face of constant opposition? Because that's... for one

thing, that's all they did. They... Most of them, not all, not Marc Antony,

not Andrew Jackson, but all the others had fairly arid personal lives. They

were giving themselves to whatever it was they were doing for the world.

And it often was for the world. And they were willing to sacrifice personal

happiness for this. Andrew Jackson had a lifelong love affair with his

wife, whom he earned by killing a man in a duel over her. You can think of

very few others, and Marc Antony who was destroyed because of his love for

Cleopatra. But this question of energy and focus is crucial to doing the

kinds of things these men did.

MJ: Would you tell us a bit about your early years? You touch on it in the

book quite a bit.

CH: Yeah, I was very fortunate. I was brought up, not born, but brought up

from my earliest memories, can't have been more than a year old when I went

to Michigan, living in a rural, arboreal community really, in the woods. In

a community of maybe a hundred people. What, fifty, sixty families, in

which I went to a one room school, with 13 pupils in each grade, 3 of whom

were my cousins. Obviously there's no possibility of organized sports at

such a school. Half the girls... have the students were girls, and...

MJ: And you were the only one in your class, is that correct?

CH: I was the only one in my class, that's right. Which was kind of good.

Because we sat at our own desks, and whoever was being... having a lesson

would sit on a bench at the front, maybe there might be two students, or

even three, but you got to listen, and I think I learned a lot. It was a

marvelous boyhood. Then my parents was divorced when I was ten, which was

the traumatic experience of my life, including World War II, and... but

that led me to Northwestern, where I studied acting on a scholarship, where

I met my wife, who made my life. Without Lydia, my life... I would not be

sitting talking to you.

MJ: You have a photo in the book of a very young Charlton Heston, and a

very relieved looking face with your father.

CH: Oh, well, I had decided to run away from home, and my father,

understanding how little boys do this, said, "Ok, fine. Do you want me to

drive you to the highway?" And I said, "Yeah, ok, I guess." And he said,

"It's going to be a while before you get a ride to West branch, and then

you can get a train if you have some money." And I had only then begun to

consider the complications of running away from home. And of course shortly

after he dropped me off at the road, I walked back to the house. And... My

father was a...was a good man. I missed him during some years in my life,

crucial years perhaps, after my parents divorced. From my mother's point of

view, it was a very bitter time. Indeed she never, even till her death last

year at 96, she never quite got over her experience. And I respect that.

But, I do remember my father, I loved him I did come to have a good

relationship with him, as of course I did with my father - with my mother-

and my stepfather too.

MJ: Can you tell us about your own family?

CH: My family depends, obviously, on the fact that I persuaded my wife to

marry me before I went oversees in the war. If I'd not succeeded in that

effort, I would not be here, I don't think. She would certainly not have

been available. Some 4-F would have married her, and taken her out of

school. And I'm sure I would not be here. I believe very strongly in the

significance of the family as the basic building brick of any society. A

community, a town, a city, a state, a nation. The world. If you don't have

a family structure that is dominant, dominant in determining how the

children are educated, how they are taught the difference between right and

wrong; that there is a difference between right and wrong, is... that

community cannot thrive. And I think I was very fortunate in having Lydia

as my wife. And then our children grew up to be responsible, successful

individuals, for which I take no credit. I think everyone grows up to be

what he or she is going to be, according to how he or she approaches it.

And we were very lucky.

MJ: Your son is in the movie business?

CH: Yeah, he's a director. He's finishing as we speak a film for Castle

Rock. And then he's doing a film for Paramount and so on.

MJ: You're very active in the United States in political circles. You're a

strong supporter of the National Rifle Association....

CH: Well, I have been.... I like to think of it as a populist in the Andrew

Jackson tradition. It's important to remember the United States was founded

by an extraordinary collection of geniuses, really. How we lucked into that

is beyond belief. It would take a bunch of geniuses like Madison, and

Adams, and Tom Payne, and Ben Franklin, and Jefferson, to invent the United

States. And here these wise old dead white guys made the whole thing up.

And how could they do that? How is that possible? But they did. And what

they were concerned about, and what the whole Constitution of the United

States is designed to do, is protect the individual against the invasion of

the government. Now, my wife Lydia says that's not really the populist

position. I think it is. It was certainly Andrew Jackson's position. And I

believe in that. I think we have gone astray. We have become, as indeed,

have many governments in the world, become oriented toward the role of big

government. I distrust big government. I think people do better if they're

allowed to behave on their own. That's how the country was founded.

MJ: Most of us last saw you in the movie "True Lies." What are you doing

these days? What's a typical work day for you these days?

CH: Well, I just finished a film for Castle Rock, which will be released in

the spring. And, of course, the past few months, I've been selling my

autobiography. But I did manage to cram in... I had to shut down acting

entirely for the, for eight months last year while I was finishing the

autobiography. I cannot act until it's finished. And I didn't, which was

the longest time I'd gone without acting since World War II. And so I

finished the book, then I was selling the book, but in the course of all

that last summer I managed to do a film for Castle Rock in which I play a

very interesting heavy. It's called "Alaska," it will be called something

else when it's released. And also I am going to do a role in Ken Branagh's

film of Hamlet, in, after the first of the year, which will be very

interesting. A basic rule of my career has been "Never turn down a good

opportunity to do Shakespeare." So that's as far as I've gotten.

MJ: You've seen Hollywood over the years. How has it changed from your

early days in Hollywood?

CH: Well, I came in just at the end of the studio system. It was still in

place, but it was ended really. And Burt and Kirk Douglas and Paul Newman

were under firm contract along with everyone else, and I was fortunate in

securing one of the first independent contracts, and one of the first to

benefit from being an independent, being able to work for whomever you

wanted, whenever you wanted. And do plays, and other things too. Along with

Jack Lemon, and Jimmy Dean, and some other guys. The major change since

then, aside from very soon, everybody was an independent, I was just among

the first, is that the enormous increase in the cost of making films, has

changed the whole structure of the industry. In a bad way. For example: now

they can no longer make Ben Hur, or Spartacus, or Lawrence of Arabia, or

Ten Commandments, or Ben Hur, or El Cid, those are all too expensive to

make now. They would be impossible to make. And they will never be remade.

Now, in a certain sense you say, "Well that's good for me, because then

they keep running the versions I made." But it's too bad, really, that

they can't remake some of those. Now, they are going to remake "Planet of

the Apes." Oliver Stone I believe is going to remake it. And that's good.

But that's a cheaper film to do, and they can do that better, probably. But

it's too bad that they can never make musicals. They can never make The

Bridge on the River Kwai, or any of those, the great epics again. And

that's... The cost of making movies is the main problem in making films.

MJ: What are your goals? What goals do you possibly have left that you

haven't achieved?

CH: To get it right one time. One time. One time.

MJ: Thank you for joining us today.

CH: Thank you. Thank you.